J.F. Kirwan - 88° North

Jake’s eyes remained locked onto Nadia.

None of this was on her agenda, which was simply ‘Kill Salamander’. But the more she thought about it, about how few days she had left, the more she wanted to rescue at least one person from a dismal life. Jake had said these places would be here tomorrow. There was the problem. No one acted. And soon, for her at least, there would be no tomorrow.

Nadia turned to the smoky-eyed girl. ‘What about you?’

The girl glanced around furtively, and spoke in a low voice. ‘No way out,’ she said, taking a glass. Nadia seized her wrist before the glass reached her mouth.

‘What’s your name? Your real one.’

More furtive glances. ‘Jin Fe,’ she said. She stared at the bubbles in her glass. ‘It’s a joke. My mother was bilingual, Cantonese and English. Jin means swallow, like the bird. Fe means coffee. Swallow coffee.’ She tried to smile, failed, and took a sip.

The blonde’s eyes hardened. She put down her glass, and pointed four fingers in the air. ‘Have it your way,’ she said, and left the table.

It was well-choreographed. Three of the dancers got down from the bar, joined the girls chatting up the punters, and led them to a back room, champagne bottles and ice buckets and all. Four men in cheap black suits and shoelace ties appeared out of the woodwork, two in front of Nadia and Jake, two behind. All of them were thick-set, heads shaved at the front, ponytails at the rear of their scalps. The one directly in front had a dragon tattoo rising from his collar, coiling up over his chin onto his left cheek, a scaly claw poised next to his left eye. It looked fresh. Must have been bloody painful.

‘Five hundred dollars,’ he said, in a measured, oily voice. ‘And you get to leave on your own feet.’ The way he said it, he was hoping they didn’t have the money.

‘Sure,’ Nadia said, and pointed at the Asian girl. ‘But she comes with us.’ The girl began to back away, but Nadia held onto her wrist.

‘Two thousand for the night,’ the guy said, routinely. ‘And she comes back in the morning.’

‘Ten thousand,’ Nadia counter-offered. ‘And she never comes back.’ The girl stared at Nadia, her eyes a cocktail of fear and surprise, with just a dash of something surrendered long ago.

Hope.

Tattoo-man folded his arms, and put his thumb to his lips, as if considering the offer, but Nadia reckoned he wanted to rumble more than he wanted the cash. Probably didn’t like being upstaged by a woman. Then again …

‘One hundred thousand,’ he said, with a lop-sided grin, ‘and you keep the girl. But I’ve been there. She’s not worth it. Maybe you’ll like the taste better.’

The older woman came in from outside. She watched and listened, her narrowed chin making her look like a bird of prey in the stark lighting. No, not a bird of prey. A carrion bird. A crow. She perched at the bar.

Jake spoke. ‘We don’t have—’

Nadia felt Katya watching her. If there was an after-life, then maybe they’d soon be reunited. Or not. It didn’t matter. Nadia needed to right a wrong. This one act was a gift and a penance. In the bigger scheme of things, it didn’t amount to a piss in the ocean. But right here, right now, for Katya, for Nadia, and maybe for this girl, it was everything.

‘She’s coming with us,’ Nadia stated, like it was a done deal, because whatever else happened, that was the way the future was going to play out.

The guy’s grin twisted. ‘American Express?’ A metal rod slid from the sleeve of his suit into his right hand.

Nadia reached around behind her, to snatch her pistol from her waistband, but the crow arrived first.

‘We accept your offer of ten thousand American dollars,’ she said.

Tattoo-man’s grin crawled off his face, then he reeled off a machine-gun volley of protest in Cantonese. The crow talked just as fast, but in a lighter tone. Silk versus bullets. His onslaught faltered in the face of her firm rebuttal. His eyes flicked between her and Nadia, and then to Nadia’s waist, and the fact that she’d been reaching for something, and he did the math the crow had already computed. The other three men said nothing, waiting for their cue from the real boss. And then the crow beckoned someone from the shadows. The blonde. The crow said something, and the blonde’s face flashed disgust, then quickly recovered. She escorted Tattoo-man to one of the cubicles at the back.

The crow gestured to the bar, and Nadia, the girl and Jake walked over. The same young girl who’d delivered the champagne deposited a credit card machine on the counter.

Nadia nodded towards Jake. He pulled out his wallet, and selected one of two gold cards. Not the company one. His own. The three men hung back, but kept their eyes on the trio.

‘I’ll pay you back,’ Nadia said quietly.

‘Birthday present,’ he replied. His phone buzzed, and he cupped his hand over the mouthpiece while he confirmed the transaction.

‘She needs to get her things,’ the crow said, indicating the back.

Nadia shook her head. ‘We’ll be back to pick them up later,’ she lied. She still held the girl’s wrist. But the girl wasn’t resisting any more. ‘But she needs her passport. Send one of your men to get it.’

The crow stared at Nadia for a moment, then nodded to one of the monkey-suits. She then made a phone call of her own, presumably to confirm the money had been transferred. It took five minutes for the passport to arrive.

It felt like an hour.

Nadia, the girl and Jake left. ‘Taxi?’ Nadia said.

Jake shook his head. ‘No, the tram, then up to the Peak, then a taxi back to the hotel.’

Nadia faced the girl. ‘Don’t run, okay?’

She shook her head. ‘Where would I go? If I go back there I will be punished, and any other bar will just send me back to this one.’ She glared at Nadia. ‘What are you going to do with me?’

‘Do you have family?’

She shook her head in a way that Nadia figured it was a lie – the truth being not anymore . Perhaps her family had sold her into prostitution. She thought of her name, Jin Fe, and its origin. Forget ‘perhaps’.

She handed Jin Fe her passport. ‘I’m trading one life for another,’ Nadia said, not expecting her to understand. She imagined Katya nodding and then walking away. Nadia felt as if a weight had dropped off her shoulders.

She spotted the tram bustling down the road towards them. ‘Let’s go,’ she said.

On the other side of Central, close to the zoological park where she’d encountered Blue Fan, they took the funicular. It trundled upwards at a fifty-degree angle to the Peak, making the skyscrapers to the side look like they were leaning, and Nadia had the weird sensation she was falling uphill. Then they arrived at the highest point on Hong Kong Island. It was cooler at the top, and Nadia felt she could breathe for the first time since leaving Moscow.

They got a window-side table at the Peak restaurant, looking down over the skyscrapers competing in light shows; one that slowly shimmered up and down its body from red to blue to purple to green and back to red, another a massive spire straight out of a science fiction film, blazing a beacon of white light into the night sky. She gave Jin Fe two hundred dollars to spend in the shops, and the girl sped away like a ten-year-old with pocket money to burn.

‘She might not come back,’ Jake said.

Nadia shrugged. ‘The whole point was to get her out of her cage.’

‘Have you thought this through?’

She shook her head.

‘It’s about Katya, I get it. But we should be looking for Blue Fan and Salamander, Nadia. We don’t need complications right now—’

‘I’m dying, Jake.’